A Mighty Fortress

by David Weber

  “Read that back, please, Mahrtyn.”

  “Of course, My Lord.” The secretary cleared his throat. “ ‘My Lords, I have the duty to inform you that I have received . . . ’ ”

  .II.

  HMS Dancer, 56,

  Off Claw Island,

  Sea of Harchong

  Sir Gwylym Manthyr watched the schooner Messenger’s topsails as she cleared the mouth of Snake Channel and altered course. He couldn’t see her hull from here, but he could track the white flaw of her sails against the looming brown mountains of Claw Island, and he frowned as he contemplated them.

  His greatest concern over Hardship Bay’s suitability as an anchorage was what an easterly wind would do to it. Even a schooner would have a terrible time trying to claw her way out against an east wind. Snake Channel, the bay’s southern entrance, would be usable with the wind out of the northeast- by- east, and North Channel would be usable with the wind out of the southeast- by-east, but a galleon would have trouble making it out of either channel even under those conditions. At the moment, however, the wind (such as there was and what there was of it) was out of the south- southwest, and Messenger settled down on the starboard tack, with the wind almost broad on the beam, and headed for his flagship.

  All the rest of his command—fifty- three ships—lay hove- to in Shell Sound, the broad body of water between Green Island and Hardship Shoal. It was oppressively hot, even by Charisian standards. He’d left his tunic in his cabin, yet sweat glued his shirt to his skin, and when he held his hand an inch or so above one of the black- painted quarterdeck carronades, the heat radiated back up against his palm as if from the top of a stove. The awnings rigged above the deck to give the crew some little shade helped, but in Manthyr’s opinion, it was basically the difference between being slowly baked in an oven or broiled over an open flame.

  He’d expected heat, but he hadn’t been prepared for heat this hot, and the fact that the wind had dropped to no more than a gentle breeze didn’t help. Nor was it going to speed Messenger to Dancer anytime soon. In this wind, even the fleet little schooner was doing well to make two or three knots with all sail set, and she had the better part of fifteen miles to cover to reach the flagship.

  Manthyr looked up at the sun and pursed his lips. Call it five hours—more likely six—and it was already past eleven. He grimaced and stepped back into the quarterdeck awning’s shade. It wasn’t a particularly dense shade, but after the unfiltered, eye- searing sunlight beyond it, it felt like stepping into a cave.

  A very hot cave.

  “Dahnyld?” he said, turning his head and blinking as he looked for his flag lieutenant before his eyes had really adjusted to the relative dimness.

  “Yes, Sir?” Lieutenant Dahnyld Rahzmahn responded from somewhere behind him, and he turned towards the voice.

  “Ah, there you are!” The admiral shook his head, smiling in wry sympathy. “I was afraid you’d finally been rendered down.”

  “Not quite yet, Sir.” Rahzmahn returned his admiral’s smile, although, truth be told, Manthyr’s jest cut entirely too close to reality, in the lieutenant’s opinion. Rahzmahn was a Chisholmian, one of the growing number of Chisholmians being integrated into the Imperial Navy, with exotic (by Charisian standards) auburn hair and gray eyes . . . and a fair complexion that was perfectly happy to burn angry red, blister, or even peel painfully but flatly refused to tan.

  “Well, there’s time yet, I suppose,” Manthyr chuckled. It wasn’t that he didn’t sympathize; it was simply that there wasn’t anything either of them could do about it except laugh.

  “No, Sir,” Rahzmahn agreed. “In the meantime, though, was there something you needed me to do?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.” Manthyr waved in Messenger’s direction. “I imagine it’s going to take five or six hours for her to reach us. Under the circumstances, I thought we might move supper forward and invite Commander Grahzaial to join us this evening. It seems the least we can do after sending him all the way in to talk to these people.”

  “Of course, Sir. Do you wish Captain Mahgail to join you?”

  “The Captain, Master Seasmoke, and Lieutenant Krughair—no, Krughair will have the watch, won’t he?” Manthyr thought for a moment, then shrugged. “Make it Lieutenant Wahldair and young Svairsmahn. And you, of course.”

  “So... six guests, including me?” Rahzmahn said, mentally counting up the names. “I’ll go and tell Naiklos, Sir.” The flag lieutenant smiled again, faintly. “He’s still going to complain that we didn’t give him enough notice, you realize.”

  “Of course he is. It’s what he does.”

  Manthyr’s answering smile held just a bit of resignation. Raiyhan Hahlmyn, his servant of many years, had been killed at Darcos Sound, and Manthyr missed him badly. Not just because they’d been together for so long, although that was definitely part of it, but also because Hahlmyn had suited him so well. Manthyr’s birth had been as common as even a future Charisian seaman’s came, and Hahlmyn had been a Howell Bay fisherman before he joined the Navy. Personally, Manthyr suspected “Raiyhan Hahlmyn” hadn’t always been the man’s name. There’d been any number of men like that in the Royal Charisian Navy, and that hadn’t changed now that it was the Imperial Charisian Navy. As long as a man did his duty and didn’t get into fresh trouble, the Navy was willing to overlook any indiscretions in his previous life. In Hahlmyn’s case, Manthyr had observed that he never voluntarily went ashore in Tellesberg.

  What ever might have lurked in Hahlmyn’s past, young Lieutenant Manthyr had always found him a reliable hand and a skilled coxswain. When Lieutenant Commander Manthyr got his first command, he’d taken Hahlmyn with him, first as his personal coxswain and then, later, as his cabin servant. Calling him a “valet” would have stretched a perfectly ser viceable noun far beyond its acceptable limits. Still, he’d been loyal, tough, hardworking, and remarkably good with a cutlass, which had done perfectly well for Gwylym Manthyr.

  Yet he was gone now, and Sir Gwylym Manthyr had required a replacement. Enter Naiklos Vahlain, who clearly considered Manthyr a work in progress. The dapper, dark- haired valet was about ten years older than Manthyr, and he’d been highly recommended by Domynyk Staynair.

  “He’ll fuss and fidget you to death,” Staynair had said, “but he’ll also manage to feed you hot soup in the middle of a howling gale. No matter how long you give him to prepare for a formal dinner, he’ll swear it’s not long enough . . . then come up with a five- course meal and somehow conjure up fresh vegetables when you’re stuck in the middle of The Anvil. And, to be honest, Gwylym, I think he’s exactly what you’re going to need now that you’ve got your streamer.”

  There hadn’t been much doubt in Manthyr’s mind what Rock Point had been getting at. Captains might not have to worry overmuch about appearances; admirals did. And the unvarnished truth was that Manthyr’s life and career had made him a consummate professional as a seaman but didn’t seem to have gotten him around to matters of etiquette, the proper choice of wines, or all those other little details admirals were supposed to know about.

  Vahlain was fixing that, and there were times Manthyr felt a certain kinship with a white- hot piece of bar stock being hammered into a horse shoe. He was deeply grateful, but that didn’t necessarily mean he enjoyed the process, and Vahlain was just as persnickety, finicky, precise, and downright fussy as Rock Point had warned him the man would be.

  Which, the admiral reflected, watching his flag lieutenant head below, was why he’d sent Rahzmahn to beard Vahlain in his den. Rank, after all, had its privileges.

  In the end, they didn’t have to move supper forward after all . . . much to Vahlain’s long- suffering (if unvoiced) disgust. The wind had continued to drop, falling to a complete calm with Messenger still two miles short of the flagship, and Lieutenant Commander Grahzaial had covered the final distance in his quarter boat. At the moment, his oarsmen were enjoying a well- deserved rest in Dancer’s crew’s mess while Grahzaial apolo
gized to his admiral for the delay.

  Like Rahzmahn, Grahzaial was a Chisholmian, although he was as darkhaired and-eyed as any Charisian. He tanned better than Rahzmahn, too, Manthyr thought with a certain amusement, watching them stand almost side by side. In fact, Grahzaial had darkened to a deep, coppery bronze which, combined with his rather worn tunic (like most of the Navy’s junior ship commanders, he didn’t appear overly long in the purse), gave him a distinctly piratical look. Or, rather, the look pirates were supposed to have according to bad novels. Manthyr had read a novel, once. The fact that it had been about pirates might have been one reason he’d never read another. After all, he’d met real pirates, and anything less like the jolly, good- hearted- but- misunderstood characters in that particular literary abortion would have been difficult to imagine.

  He shook that thought aside and waved away Grahzaial’s apologies. “Don’t worry about it, Commander. No one can issue orders to the wind—well, not and have them obeyed, anyway! Frankly, you did well to get here this promptly. I understand from my valet, however,” he very carefully did not cock a wary eye in Naiklos Vahlain’s direction, “that supper is ready. I suggest we all sit down and eat before it spoils. We can discuss such minor things as reports after we have that safely out of the way.”

  The sniff of satisfaction he thought he heard from the direction of Vahlain’s pantry was probably only his imagination.

  Sometime later, when Vahlain and the wardroom steward he’d pressed into ser -vice had cleared the table, poured the wine, and put Manthyr’s tobacco humidor in the center of the table, the admiral leaned back in his chair with a sigh of content.

  The wind had picked back up a bit, and the canvas wind scoop rigged for the skylight funneled some of it through the dining cabin. It brought with it a welcome breath of coolness, blowing back out through the stern and quarter windows. Fussy as Vahlain might be, he’d done his usual outstanding job, and two of the wyverns he’d acquired when the fleet paid a brief call at Westbreak Island to take on water and fresh vegetables had made the ultimate sacrifice. The vegetables which had been purchased at the same time were mostly gone, but the hens were laying well enough to provide mayonnaise, and Vahlain had contrived a potato salad—heavy on pickles and onions and short on celery and bell pepper, unfortunately, but still tasty—to accompany the roasted, rice-stuffed wyverns. Fresh- baked bread and butter (which, alas, had been somewhat less fresh than the bread) and spiced bread pudding had completed the menu.

  Now the admiral lit his pipe and waited patiently while everyone but young Master Svairsmahn, Dancer’s signal midshipman, followed his example. Once all pipes were drawing nicely, Manthyr cocked an eyebrow at Mahshal Grahzaial.

  “And now that the evening’s serious business is out of the way, Commander,” he said around his pipe stem, “suppose you tell us how your mission ashore went?”

  “Of course, Sir.” Grahzaial straightened and cleared his throat. “As you instructed, I carried your message to Claw Keep.” He grimaced. “Calling it a ‘keep’ is a definite overstatement, in my opinion, Sir Gwylym. It does have a curtain wall, but I imagine we could knock it down with a fourteen- pounder in an afternoon, and there’s no real keep at all. Just a couple of dozen buildings—mostly houses, of a sort, but at least three saloons—sort of huddled together inside the wall.”

  “Not too surprising, Sir,” Captain Raif Mahgail put in. Manthyr’s flag captain was a wiry, black- haired man with extremely dark brown eyes. He was eight years younger than his admiral, and his promotion to captain’s rank was relatively recent—there was a lot of that going around—but he’d been at sea since he was twelve, and there was very little he hadn’t seen.

  “That ‘curtain wall’ of Mahshal’s would be intended to discourage pirates—or, other pirates, I should say—rather than provide any serious defense.” The flag captain sniffed disdainfully. “I may not think much of the Harchongese Navy, but if these people were ever foolish enough to make themselves a serious nuisance to the Empire, all the walls in the world wouldn’t save their arses, and they know it.”

  “That was my impression, Captain,” Grahzaial agreed with a nod. “And, Admiral,” he returned his gaze to Manthyr, “they’ve got a lot of fishing boats for such a small town. Some of them are damned near as big as Messenger, too. And they’ve got brackets for swivel wolves. Captain Lahfat—he’s the fellow in charge—seemed just a bit eager to keep me from noticing that little detail.”

  “Point taken, Master Grahzaial,” Manthyr said. “Wolf” was a generic term for artillery pieces with a bore of less than two inches and a shot which weighed one pound or less. “Swivel wolves” were at the small end of the range—whether they were very light cannon or extremely heavy muskets was mostly a matter of semantics. They had little effect on the hull of a ship, but they were portable, easily mounted on a ship’s rail (or dismounted and hidden when a cruiser came along), and effective antipersonnel weapons . . . just the thing for a crew of pirates who wanted to swarm over a lightly manned, weakly armed merchant vessel.

  “So your impression is that this—Lahfat, was it?— might occasionally fish for something besides forktail or hake?” he went on, and Grahzaial nodded again.

  “I’d say that’s exactly what he does, Sir,” the lieutenant commander replied. “Mind you, from the look of things it doesn’t seem to pay very well.” Manthyr snorted. He’d never yet met a pirate who couldn’t have earned more, over the long run, doing honest work. Not to mention living longer, into the bargain. “And I don’t doubt for a moment that ‘Captain’ Lahfat’s rank was entirely... self- bestowed. I couldn’t decide where he’s from originally, but I’m pretty sure he’s not Harchongese. He’s too tall, among other things. And I don’t think he’s at all pleased with the notion of having us move in.”

  “Now, I wonder why that might be?” Yairman Seasmoke, Dancer’s first lieutenant, murmured, earning an even harsher snort from his admiral.

  “Should I assume from that that he told you to pound sand, Commander?” Manthyr asked dryly, and Grahzaial laughed.

  “I think that’s exactly what he wished he could do, Sir. Unfortunately, one of those fishing boats of his apparently got a fairly accurate count on the squadron before it ran for harbor. I don’t think he thinks all those transports are empty.”

  This time, a general mutter of laughter ran around the dining table. “Lahfat—if that’s even his real name—has obviously decided he doesn’t want to lock horns with you, Sir Gwylym,” Grahzaial continued. “He tried to argue that the island’s wells don’t produce enough water to support this many extra mouths. I think he’s exaggerating his concerns, but I don’t think he’s making them up entirely, either. In the end, though, he agreed to open his gates to us. I imagine everyone in Claw Keep is busy hiding evidence before the Marines come ashore.”

  “I imagine that’s exactly what they’re doing,” Manthyr agreed. “Well, that and trying to get a messenger out to report us to the Governor of Queiroz—or maybe Tiegelkamp, depending on the wind. I suppose he promised faithfully that no such action would ever so much as cross his mind, Commander?”

  “Something of that sort, Sir. Yes.”

  “Good.” Manthyr smiled nastily. “It’s not as if the Harchongese aren’t going to figure out we’re here pretty damned quick, if they didn’t already guess this was where we were headed. But when the good ‘Captain’s’ messenger runs into Lance lying in the middle of North Channel, it’ll give me a little more leverage with him. Or, a bigger club to beat him with, at any rate.”

  The admiral considered for several moments, then nodded to himself. “You did well, Master Grahzaial,” he said. “I’ll see to it that my reports indicate as much.”

  The young Chisholmian smiled with obvious plea sure but said nothing, and Manthyr turned to his flag captain.

  “With any luck, we’ll have a south or southeast wind tomorrow morning, Raif. Assuming we’ve got one we can work with, I want the entire fleet inside Hard
ship Bay by evening. I doubt ‘Captain Lahfat’ is stupid enough to try anything foolish, but let’s not take any chances. We’ll use a couple of the schooners to lead the squadron, and tell Brigadier Tyotayn that I want two or three companies of his Marines to go ashore and secure the ‘keep’ before we anchor.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “In that case, Gentlemen,” the admiral said, reaching for the whiskey decanter, “I think we can safely lift a glass to a job well done by Commander Grahzaial.”

  .III.

  HMS Dancer, 56,

  Off Trove Island,

  Gulf of Dohlar

  Green, Sir Gwylym Manthyr thought, was a remarkably nice color. It was particularly nice after spending two entire five- days on rocky, barren, sun- blasted, thoroughly miserable Claw Island.

  The green which prompted that particular consideration was found in the trees and grass covering Trove Island, off the Dohlar Bank. Technically, the island’s inhabitants—of which, thankfully, there were not many—were subjects of King Rahnyld of Dohlar. Trove Island, however, did not belong to King Rahnyld. Emperor Waisu VI’s ministers had made that point abundantly clear. Actually, the present emperor’s father, who had also happened to be named Waisu, had made it clear to King Rahnyld’s father (who had also happened to be named Rahnyld), and the current Waisu had simply expressed his intention to keep things that way.

  The current Rahnyld didn’t much care for it, since he had pretensions of extending Dohlaran sway throughout the entire Gulf of Dohlar. Despite the money he’d poured into the fleet which had been destroyed at Rock Point and Crag Reach, however, he’d never had the military strength to survive a serious disagreement with Harchong. It was, admittedly, unlikely Harchong would put itself to the trouble and expense of squashing Dohlaran posturing, but “unlikely” wasn’t the same thing as “never going to happen,” and provoking Harchong to military action was the sort of mistake one normally only got to make once.